Notes
---- To the Wholly Marine evil is that which is against the will of FSM, but FSM is not against evil, for FSM has no enmity. Think of the universe as a game of chess. You are free to make any valid chess move. Evil is trying to insesd you are playing a game of checkers. But no matter how much you insist you are playing checkers you can't move the pieces is a way not possible in chess. There is no punishment for making invalid moves because you can not make any; you are only able to make moves in according to FSM's Hukm. ---- ---- "You can't tell anyone anything. You have to teach people for them to remember. Let the person experience what you are teaching and they will learn."-- Benjamin Franklin ---- "First, explaining is such a misleading word. The process of knowledge transmission is rather a pull then a push operation. You as the knowledge sender can only do your best to setup the best possible situation for the receivers pull operation to succeed. Second, before any knowledge transmission could be possible, the receiver must have an appropriate cognitive network in place to connect the newly acquired to."-- Thomas Koch Comment on 'You can't tell people anything' ---- Mr. Blyth, as he informs me, saw Indian crows feeding two or three of their companions which were blind; and I have heard of an analogous case with the domestic cock. We may, if we choose, call these actions instinctive; but such cases are much too rare for the development of any special instinct. (14. As Mr. Bain states, "effective aid to a sufferer springs from sympathy proper:" 'Mental and Moral Science,' 1868, p. 245.) I have myself seen a dog, who never passed a cat who lay sick in a basket, and was a great friend of his, without giving her a few licks with his tongue, the surest sign of kind feeling in a dog. It must be called sympathy that leads a courageous dog to fly at any one who strikes his master, as he certainly will. I saw a person pretending to beat a lady, who had a very timid little dog on her lap, and the trial had never been made before; the little creature instantly jumped away, but after the pretended beating was over, it was really pathetic to see how perseveringly he tried to lick his mistress's face, and comfort her. Brehm (15. 'Thierleben,' B. i. s. 85.) states that when a baboon in confinement was pursued to be punished, the others tried to protect him. It must have been sympathy in the cases above given which led the baboons and Cercopitheci to defend their young comrades from the dogs and the eagle. I will give only one other instance of sympathetic and heroic conduct, in the case of a little American monkey. Several years ago a keeper at the Zoological Gardens shewed me some deep and scarcely healed wounds on the nape of his own neck, inflicted on him, whilst kneeling on the floor, by a fierce baboon. The little American monkey, who was a warm friend of this keeper, lived in the same large compartment, and was dreadfully afraid of the great baboon. Nevertheless, as soon as he saw his friend in peril, he rushed to the rescue, and by screams and bites so distracted the baboon that the man was able to escape, after, as the surgeon thought, running great risk of his life. -- Charles Darwin The Descent of Man ---- Twenty percent of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, separating spirituality from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important truths simultaneously: Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit. One purpose of this book is to give both these convictions intellectual and empirical support. Before going any further, I should address the animosity that many readers feel toward the term spiritual. Whenever I use the word, as in referring to meditation as a “spiritual practice,” I hear from fellow skeptics and atheists who think that I have committed a grievous error. The word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, which is a translation of the Greek pneuma, meaning “breath.” Around the thirteenth century, the term became entangled with beliefs about immaterial souls, supernatural beings, ghosts, and so forth. It acquired other meanings as well: We speak of the spirit of a thing as its most essential principle or of certain volatile substances and liquors as spirits. Nevertheless, many nonbelievers now consider all things “spiritual” to be contaminated by medieval superstition. I do not share their semantic concerns.My late friend Christopher Hitchens—no enemy of the lexicographer—didn’t share them either. Hitch believed that spiritual was a term we could not do without. It is true that he didn’t think about spirituality in precisely the way I do. He spoke instead of the spiritual pleasures afforded by certain works of poetry, music, and art. The symmetry and beauty of the Parthenon embodied this happy extreme for him—without there being any need to admit the existence of the goddess Athena, much less devote ourselves to her worship. Hitch also used the terms numinous and transcendent to mark occasions of great beauty or significance, and for him the Hubble Deep Field was an example of both. (I’m sure he was aware that pedantic excursions into the OED would produce etymological embarrassments regarding these words as well.) Carl Sagan also freely used the term spiritual in this way. (See C. Sagan. 1995. The Demon-Haunted World. New York: Random House. p. 29.)  I have no quarrel with Hitch and Sagan’s general use of spiritual to mean something like “beauty or significance that provokes awe,” but I believe that we can also use it in a narrower and, indeed, more personally transformative sense. Yes, to walk the aisles of any “spiritual” bookstore is to confront the yearning and credulity of our species by the yard, but there is no other term—apart from the even more problematic mystical or the more restrictive contemplative—with which to discuss the efforts people make, through meditation, psychedelics, or other means, to fully bring their minds into the present or to induce nonordinary states of consciousness. And no other word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives. --Sam Harris WAKING UP Spirituality must be distinguished from religion—because people of every faith, and of none, have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences. While these states of mind are usually interpreted through the lens of one or another religious doctrine, we know that this is a mistake. Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu can experience—self-transcending love, ecstasy, bliss, inner light—constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs, because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another. A deeper principle must be at work. ---- It gave her the sense of a Beyond, and that is the true life of all religion.-- Friedrich Max Müller, Natural Religion p.569 The whole world in its wonderful history has passed through that struggle for life; and every one of us, in his own not less wonderful history, has had to pass through the same struggle ; for, without it, no religion, whatever its sacred books may be, will find in any human heart that soil in which alone it can strike root and on which alone it can grow and bear fruit. We must all have our own bookless religion, if the Sacred Books, whatever they be, are to find a safe and solid foundation within ourselves. No temple can stand without that foundation, and it is because that foundation is so often neglected, that the walls of the temple become unsafe and threaten to fall. It is easy to say it before an audience like this, but I should not be afraid to say it before an audience of Brahmans, Buddhists, Christians, and Jews, that there is no religion in the whole world which in simplicity, in purity of purpose, in charity and true humanity, comes near to that religion which Nanak taught to his sikhs. Surely a truth is not less a truth because it is believed by heathens also, because it belongs to that religion which is universal? It is easy enough to discover the blemishes of other religions, though many of them seem far more gross and repulsive to us than they really are. 'It is hardly fair,' as a friend of mine wrote to me, 'to translate the Sacred Books of the East,—they are so infinitely inferior to our own.' Yes, they are, but that is the very reason why we should look all the more carefully and eagerly for any grains of truth that may be hidden beneath an accumulation of rubbish. The heart and mind and soul of man are the same under every sky, in all the varying circum stances of human life; and it would indeed be awful to believe that any human beings should have been deprived of that light' which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.' It is that light which lighteth every man, and which has lighted all the religions of the world, call them bookless or literate, human or divine, natural or supernatural, which alone can dispel the darkness of doubt and fear that has come over the world. What our age wants more than anything else is Natural Religion. ---- Sudden happiness is a warning sign of suicide. Not only can the decision to commit suicide make you happy; but Sudden Sukha causes Dukkha. ---- ---- ---- The value of ritualistic exercises can be properly astimated only when e takeinto consideration the multitudes to whom such ceremonies appeal with all the force of reality. Other features of the programs of fraternal soieties are essentially similar to those of literary clubs--readings, essays, debates, muscal selections, ets. In addition, fraternal solicitude and the wwork which grows out of it find a permenet place in these meetings. It is customary in several great orders for the presiding officer to open the meeting with the question, “Does any brother know of a brother or a brother's family in need?” or words to that effect. Other socities adopt analogous forms. This is aa truly beautiful custom, which can hardly fail to teach that in modren society vital relations exist among men, and that, is a sense at least, every man is every other man's keeper. The unobtrusive manner in which relief is given affords practical illustrations of true charity, in which every piece of silver is accompanied by golden, loving words and more loving deeds. ---- ---- ---- ---- "Before the miners arrived here the Indians lived their normal life. They lived in the jungle, but now they have more comfort, they have more food and the gold miners bring them progress. They bring them food, clothes all the things that they need and the Indians adore the miners. The impression that people have on the outsides that the miners fight with the Indians, this is not true. The Indians love the miners and the miners like the Indians." And some Yanomamo, themselves, believe the miners have brought death to the human race. "Many people ask for the White man's things. I say to them, "Don't ask for those things. The miners are only going to lie to you. They've already killed some of our people. They're very fierce. When there are enough of them, they are going to kill us. That is what I say, but no one hears me." ----